零点击营销：当搜索、社交与AI不再带来流量，创始人如何取胜

Today, I want to talk about a problem that I think every founder in this room is feeling but might not have the words for yet. You keep hearing that content compounds, SEO is a long game, and that if you just keep publishing, the traffic will come. But, if search sends fewer clicks, social media suppresses links, and AI answers your prospect's question before they ever reach your site, and more on that later, you can't just publish content and hope for the best.

So, I'll show you what's actually happening on the web, why the old playbook is broken, and what you can do about it starting next week or when you whenever you get back to your desk. So, I will start by painting a picture of the world that we all grew up in as digital marketers. So, for years, digital marketing's superpower was supposed to be measurability. For search engines, right, we would optimize signals, get rankings and clicks.

For social networks, you know, we used to post links to draw traffic. For, you know, news media and blogs, you'd pitch coverage to get links and traffic. For ad networks, we would just buy the traffic. Now, you measured all of it with traffic plus attribution to sign-ups, sales, and revenue. The squishy stuff, like impressions, share of voice, that was for the channels where you couldn't really get credit, right? This was This was a tidy system.

It was predictable, legible to your CFO. But, here's the problem now. We call this the alligator graph. Impressions rise, clicks decline. The jaws keep opening. The core problem now isn't that nobody sees your marketing, it's that more people see it, but fewer of them click. So, if this looks like your Google Search Console, you're not alone. So, this is from The Financial Times, right? Condé Nast CEO says, you know, well, major publishers are seeing the same trend, right?

Impressions up, clicks down, across the board. This is a structural shift in how the internet works now, and it's not a problem with your content. So, you might be thinking, well, search is dying and everyone is using ChatGPT and maybe this particular problem doesn't matter, but search is not dying. In fact, it keeps growing. So, this is um this is from the State of Search Q4 2025 report by Datos and SparkToro, my company.

So, since about this time last year, traditional search, AI tools, and e-commerce search have all grown. But, and this is this is the important part, a bigger share of searches now end without a click. The pie is getting bigger, but the slice that reaches your website is getting smaller. And that changes what winning looks like. And when we say search, right, most of us picture Google, but search is now a behavior. It's not a channel, and it's happening everywhere, right?

Traditional search engines still dominate, right? About 81% of all searches, Google alone is like 74%. But look at the rest. Commerce platforms like Amazon and I think eBay, it's like 10%, right? Um social networks like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, 5%. AI tools, like ChatGPT and Claude, it's about 3% and it's growing fast. So, that means roughly one in five searches is happening somewhere other than a traditional search engine.

And on every single one of these platforms, that zero-click problem applies. And what site doesn't want to send you traffic? Why would it, right? It wants you to buy in the platform. YouTube doesn't want people to leave. So, when I say zero-click problem, I'm not just talking about Google. I'm talking about everywhere people go to find answers. And when they do search Google, by the way, here's what actually happens.

So, in 2024, or yeah, we looked at at over at SparkToro and at Datos, we looked at the clickstream data of 2024, we found what happened after Americans searched on Google. So, out of every Google search, 41.5% resulted in one or more clicks. Okay? 37.1% resulted in nothing. The browser session just ended. Person Googled, "How old is Paul Rudd?" 57. Can't believe it, he looks so young. They don't need to learn learn more, right? 21.4% resulted in another search.

But that means that 58.5% of all Google searches are zero-click searches. And so, of the clicks that do happen, that 41.5% column there, 70.5% go to organic results. 28.5% go to Google-owned properties, like YouTube, Maps, Google Images. And just 1% goes to paid ads. So, put another way, for every 1,000 US Google searches, only 360 clicks went to the open web. That's you and me, Bessie. That's us. Those are our websites.

Everyone in this room is competing for 360 clicks out of 1,000. And the traffic that does make it through, unfortunately, is shrinking. So, this is from Ahrefs global traffic panel of nearly 75,000 websites. I think the goodish news is that traffic to these sites dropped only about 5% in the last 18 months. Um paid and direct seem to be making up for some of the losses in search and social. But here's the thing. Pretty much all these websites are trying to grow their traffic, right?

A lot of them have marketing teams using Ahrefs. So, if these sites that are trying are losing traffic, imagine what's happening to everyone else. Here's another angle, same story. Now, this is Bloom's analysis. Zero-click searches keep climbing. AI overviews have doubled. Traffic is down 10%. Meanwhile, searches are up 15%. And somehow search is still the largest traffic referrer. More searching, less clicking. That is the world we live in now.

And it's not just search, right? This is Meta, too. Now, this is Meta's own data. I just made the chart. This is from their most widely viewed content reports, so from 2021 to 2025. 97.3 of all US post views on Facebook go to updates that do not include a link that sends people out. All right, Facebook is burying posts with external links. Their own Meta Business Suite, they started advising business accounts to put links in the comments.

Yeah, my friend here is nodding. Yeah, I did that. And here we thought that was just what the LinkedIn bros did, right? LinkedIn comments. The platforms don't want to send you traffic. They want to keep people on platform. So, let me zoom out and show you what the rest of the web looks like. So, this one is from SimilarWeb's global panel in January 2026. Right, at SparkToro, we looked at the top 5,000 most visited websites on the web and grouped them into five buckets.

Google alone, that's the first bucket. They get roughly as many visits as the next 13 sites combined. Those next 13 sites are like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, ChatGPT, X, Reddit, Wikipedia. All of them together roughly equal Google. Then the third category, it's about 170 more sites. And then about 1,300. And then the remaining 3,500 sites. The concentration at the top is staggering. And most of us, we're in the bottom tier.

Here's another way to see it. Same data. It's Google versus literally everyone you think is big online. And this is the playing field. This is where your startup lives. Somewhere in that long tail competing for the scraps. So, if the old game was optimized for traffic, we have to acknowledge that we're now competing for increasingly scarce attention from increasingly dominant platforms. But here's what I actually want you to take away from this data.

It's not that the web is dying. It's that your homepage has changed. This is your homepage now. A Google search result. This is where people find it. They form their first impression of you. It's not your beautifully designed website. Search snippet. This is also your homepage. A ChatGPT answer. Your prospect asks question, AI gives them the answer that may or may not mention you. You didn't get a click, you didn't even get a visit.

Your brand was either there or it wasn't. Oh, and by the way, I saw our friend Cole from Formspree. I'm a customer. Um I'm a customer via Claude. I I saw you in a Claude response. I didn't go to your website. I mean, I did eventually to make my account, but I was just like, "Nope, got it in Claude. I'm going to become a customer, right?

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